Juxtaposing inference capabilities of deep neural models over posteroanterior chest radiographs facilitating COVID-19 detection

Abstract

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 or SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has affected 21 million people worldwide and is responsible for 0.75 million deaths (as of August 2020). Declared as a pandemic by the WHO, the virus has affected almost every country after originating in China articulating how contagious the virus is. With reasonable social measures, countries have already shown depreciation in coronavirus cases. This paper deals with detecting and distinguishing the COVID-19 disease from normal patients through frontal chest X-ray scans using Convolutional Neural Networks. Different combinations of parameters were used to train multiple CNNs and their behavior was noted. After thorough experimentation of different models, the best model which achieved an accuracy of 0.98 on the test set with a loss of 0.036 was nominated. The selected model’s more intuitive accuracy metrics were calculated and its intermediate convolutional neural activations and receiver-operating characteristics curve is shown.